IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING...YES!
In the late afternoon with long-time friends, Margaret and I celebrated the wedding of their youngest child, Michael Grady, a spectacular almost-thirty or perhaps already-thirty-year-old man whom we have known since he was a wonderful child. At the wedding we were the couple who had been married longest. After the wedding we stopped by the 10th Avenue Art Center in downtown San Diego where Clyde Yoshida is the invited artist for a show that will run through this month. On the rooftop of the Art Center a young woman came up to Margaret and asked if they could have their picture taken with her because the young woman said she didn’t have a grandmother. On the way back to the car a couple of blocks from the Art Center, as we rounded a corner at Eleventh Avenue and E Street, Margaret did a slight stumble, not even close to a fall; and a couple of mid-forty guys, one African American and the other Caucasian, stopped in the middle of their conversation and turned to us... The African American fellow who had been drinking, or perhaps smoking, just enough to be pleasant, reached his arm out in the universal gesture of support and said, “Are you O.K. Mother.” Of course, they couldn’t have known that we had been to a wedding where we acknowledged that we had been married for a very long time. Our car was right there... as I was opening the door for Margaret, the white guy asked, “How long have you two been together?” I told them we had been married for fifty-five years, and they both seemed wowed that people could even live that long... especially together. I was touched. I shook hands with them... right there at a place in San Diego where some people might expect to get mugged. I told them my name and they told me theirs. I got into the car with my wife of fifty-five years and drove home a very, very contented man. I felt comfortably old. Life is Good.